This invention pertains to the arts of automatic analysis, classification, characterization, routing and response to text-based messages in electronic asynchronous messaging systems, and especially to electronic mail and facsimile systems.
The above referenced application Ser. No. 09/323,312, filed on Jun. 1, 1999, by V. A Shiva Ayyadurai, is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety, including drawings, and hereby is made a part of this application.
Electronic mail and facsimile (xe2x80x9cfaxxe2x80x9d) messaging have become critical tools of everyday personal and business life. Most corporations, government agencies, organizations, and institutions have established fax numbers and e-mail addresses for a wide variety of contact purposes, including requesting information such as literature and office locations from the entity, requesting investment information, requesting service on or technical support for a product, reporting a product problem or failure, submitting suggestions for products and service improvements, submitting complimentary comments, and in some cases, carrying on dialogues with personalities and celebrities associated with the entity. Fax and email messaging have converged in electronic form, as messages originating in the form of fax are commonly captured by computers with fax/modem interfaces and optically converted to text files, and as many services offer low cost fax message delivery via e-mail-based interfaces.
Underlying the tremendous proliferation of fax and email are several factors, including wide-spread availability of inexpensive e-mail clients such as personal computers, and inexpensive fax machines, and the development of common standards for exchange of electronic text messages between computers, including RFC821 Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (xe2x80x9cSMTPxe2x80x9d) from the Internet Network Information Center, and Recommendation X.400 from the International Telecommunications Union (xe2x80x9cITUxe2x80x9d).
Consequently, corporations, government agencies, and other entities which successfully promote the availability of their fax telephone numbers and e-mail addresses can receive thousands to tens-of-thousands of messages per day.
Traditionally, all of the electronic messages are received in a general repository, or xe2x80x9cmailboxxe2x80x9d, and reviewed by human agents for their content, intent, at which time a determination of the correct disposition of the email is made. This may involve sending the author a standard reply, and/or copying or forwarding the e-mail to one or more divisions, departments, or individuals within the organization for further handling. In the later case where multiple parties must be consulted, the consolidation of replies from all of the parties can be cumbersome and overwhelming, given the volume of messages to be handled.
For example, assume a company receives five thousand messages per day. Further assume that on average each one of those messages contains issues or requests that involve an average of 3 departments or individual. The original message must be read once by the reviewing agent who forwards the message to the 3 individuals or departments. The receiving departments may read the forwarded message one to three times per department before it reaches the person who can respond. In total, 5,000 received e-mails may result in up to 20,000 to 50,000 reviews of the messages within the company. In many cases, the final recipient may need to instigate a short dialogue over several message exchanges with the author to ascertain exactly what the author needs or how the author can be serviced. Consequently, a daily volume of 5,000 new messages may reasonably result in a total network volume and work load of tens-of-thousands to a hundred-thousand messages per day.
To deal with this volume of messages and to attempt to provide a timely response to these messages, some systems have been developed which allow the human reviewer to combine and create or select a response from libraries of standard responses. For example, FIG. 1 shows a prior art method wherein a customer for a company creates an initial message using an e-mail viewer and editor (1), and transmits (2) that message into an e-mail routing system (3). The corporation will receive (4) the message and an agent will read it using another e-mail viewer and editor (5). As the agent manually analyzes the message content (7), he or she may search (8) a file or database (15) which contains text replies to the most commonly asked questions. The agent then selects one or more of the text replies, uses a xe2x80x9ccut and pastexe2x80x9d user interface function (11) to compose the basis for an e-mail reply, composes the remainder of the reply (that which is not drawn from the database or not provided for by the database), and sends (12) that message back to the customer via the e-mail routing system (3) using the e-mail view and editor (5) send or reply function. Finally, the customer may receive his or her reply by retrieving (14) the message from the e-mail routing system (3), and reading it with his or her e-mail viewer (1). This xe2x80x9ccut and pastexe2x80x9d method can reduce the amount of labor required to respond to only a low percentage of the messages received as the database will contain answers only to commonly asked questions. Complicated questions and follow-up messages may not be able to be handled by this method, so ultimately, some percentage of these messages are not handled with this method and are transferred or forwarded to one or more recipients for manual disposition.
For example, a typical two-issue email is given in TABLE 1.
Using the method of FIG. 1, an agent would search the sample responses for the response to the first issue, the request for technical specifications, and would cut and paste the following text into a new or reply e-mail, as shown in TABLE 2.
Then, the agent would search for a response to the second issue, the request for the nearest service center, and would paste text into the message as shown in TABLE 3.
Finally, the agent would complete the composition by adding connective text to complete a comprehendible message, as shown in TABLE 4.
If some of the issues presented by the initial message from the customer are not provided for by the sample reply database, the agent may need to manually forward the message to one or more specialists or departments, finally merging their replies with other sample replies.
FIG. 2 shows a slightly more advanced method in the prior art, whereby the e-mail is received from the customer to an agent""s e-mail viewer and editor (5) in the same manner as described above and shown in FIG. 1. However, a database of entire message responses (22) is available for the agent to simply select to be sent to the customer. The agent manually browses or searches the library of standard replies (22) using an index (21), and the reply message or messages is automatically sent based on the agent""s selection. Using this method, the time required to cut and paste a new reply and to complete the message is eliminated as each reply contained in the library is a complete reply in and of itself, and the issues not provided for in the library may be handled separately. For example, the two issues presented in the message of TABLE 1 could be handled with two separate messages, as shown in TABLE 5 and TABLE 6, both selected from the library of standard complete replies.
While this second method reduces the labor to generate the reply, it has several disadvantages. The first of which is the fact that the customer received multiple replies for a single message. The second is that the messages miss the xe2x80x9chuman touchxe2x80x9d and are obviously xe2x80x9ccannedxe2x80x9d because they contain no information which is personal to the customer, such as addressing him by name. Also, the second reply does not actually answer his question, but refers him to the source for his answer. Finally, for any issues presented in the message for which no standard reply is available in the library, a third message reply may be sent to the customer by a specialist.
Therefore, there exists a need in the art for an automated reply system and method which intelligently composes a preliminary response to a message which may contain one or more issues or requests.
Further, there exists a need in the art for this automated reply system to use conventional technology and techniques which find practical application to the analysis of free-form written speech.
Additionally, there exists a need in the art for this system to allow a human agent to review, correct, modify, or cancel a proposed reply.
Still further, there exists a need for this system to be capable of autonomous message composition and replying without need for human agent intervention.